Rebecca MacKinnon

Rebecca MacKinnon Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation

Rebecca MacKinnon is a journalist, free speech activist, and expert on Chinese Internet censorship. She is presently writing a book about the future of freedom in the Internet age. In September she will join the New America Foundation as a Bernard Schwartz Senior Fellow, focusing on the intersection of the Internet, human rights, and foreign policy. MacKinnon is cofounder of Global Voices Online (globalvoicesonline.org), a global citizen media network. She also serves on the Boards of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Global Network Initiative (globalnetworkinitiative.org), a multi-stakeholder initiative to advance principles of freedom of expression and privacy in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector.

Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon worked as a journalist for CNN in Beijing for nine years, serving as CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 1998-2001 and then as CNN’s Tokyo Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 2001-03. From 2004-06 she was a Research Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where she began her study of the Chinese Internet in addition to launching Global Voices Online. In 2007 and 2008 she served on the faculty of the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, where she taught online journalism and conducted research on Chinese Internet censorship. In 2009 she continued her research and writing as an Open Society Institute Fellow, and in the Spring of 2010 she was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Center or Information Technology Policy. MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard College.